While it may well sound like sour grapes, Philip Pullman, the author of the
trilogy His Dark Materials, has castigated his fellow best-selling
novelist Dan Brown for his "flat, stunted and ugly" prose.

Philip PullmanPhoto: AP

Tim Walker

10:00PM BST 16 Sep 2009

As The Lost Symbol, Brown's follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, is published, Pullman, who has sold 15 million books, says that his rival author populates his books with "completely flat and two-dimensional" characters.

"His basic ignorance about the way people behave is astonishing, talking in utterly implausible ways to one another," says Pullman, 62.

"All the usual literary things he just doesn't know how to do, but he's not interested in those and nor are his millions of readers. There's nothing wrong in writing as he does, but it is not great writing."

Pullman, who is also published by Random House, which is printing a record 6.5 million copies of The Lost Symbol for its first print run, concedes that Brown does know how to tell a story in a way that "makes people want to keep turning pages".

Like Brown, Pullman has evoked controversy among religious groups for some of his books.

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His Dark Materials, a trilogy of fantasy novels about the coming-of-age of two children in a series of parallel universes, was criticised by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

There were claims that Pullman, an atheist, was pursuing an anti-Christian agenda.

He has, however, an admirer in the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who argues that Pullman's attacks focus on the constraints and dangers of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not on Christianity itself.